Policing at the Margins: Boundary Maintenance in U.S. Municipalities

• In Event: Race, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Policing

Abstract

How do patterns of economic and racial segregation shape policing behavior in the United States? In contrast to a pure crime fighting model, we ask whether police engage primarily in boundary maintenance at the intersection of gentrifying neighborhoods and their nearby, poorer neighborhoods irrespective of whether and where crime is actually a threat. Critical race scholars have suggested that law enforcement as an institution explicitly serve this function writ large (Davis 2011, Alexander 2011, Wacquant 2009). Yet, empirical studies are both rare and limited to snapshots of a single city (Muñiz 2015, Laniyonu 2018) that rely on disparate and fragmented data making it hard to (1) evaluate system-wide sources of racial disparities and (2) distinguish problematic practices widely employed across departments from agency- and officer-level idiosyncrasies (Shoub 2021). We introduce a new dataset with municipal addresses where police stops and arrests took place together with high-resolution geographic information systems (GIS) data for 153 major cities in the United States to evaluate the extent to which the police maintain socio-political boundaries across numerous contexts.

Authors

• Marcel Roman, University of Texas, Austin

• Michael Findley, University of Texas, Austin

• Amy H. Liu, University of Texas at Austin

• Hannah Walker, University of Texas at Austin

• Allison Verrilli, University of Texas, Austin